Open-space learning

Open-space Learning or OSL

Open-space Learning, or OSL, is a pedagogic methodology that was created, developed, and practiced at the University of Warwick beginning in 2007, and continues to be disseminated. OSL is an interdisciplinary, or better, a transdisciplinary, pedagogy, that seeks to challenge the lecture and seminar mode that dominates as the teaching orthodoxy in most British universities. The pedagogy is dependent on the use of physically 'open' spaces - in the sense that tables and chairs are absent - and an 'open' approach to intellectual content and the role of the tutor. Participants in OSL, typically but not exclusively, learn in an 'embodied' way. Thomas Docherty writes in his introduction to the recent publication on the subject: "In OSL we open public space as well as the private spaces in which we learn. The project explores how it is we can enhance what is fashionably called the student experience of learning. Experience involves risk-taking, it involves experiment, it involves not knowing the outcome of particular areas of exploration, but being willing to take the opportunity that the opening of a space affords them. The students whose work is central to this project come from diverse disciplines but they come together in the driving open of a space in which they also make time, they make time for learning. OSL is an opening to time and to history. It offers, maybe for the first time in our times, the real risk of a student experience."

Origins

OSL developed from the work of Warwick's CAPITAL Centre (Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning), which was one of the Higher Education Funding Councils of England's (HEFCE) CETLs (Centres of Excellence in Teaching and Learning.) CAPITAL was a collaboration between the Institute of Education at Warwick, the Department of English, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The basic idea was to apply the practices and theories of the theatrical rehearsal room and the theatrical ensemble across a university curriculum. From these early aspirations developed a pedagogy that has now been used successfully in a dozen departments including Chemistry, Law, Business, English, Mathematics, and Medicine.

People

OSL is a collaborative pedagogic practice and does not, therefore, have a single originator or author. Individuals involved in creating and developing the practice and theory include, in alphabetical order: Susan Brock, Jonathan Heron, Ruth Leary, Nicholas Monk, Jonothan Neelands, Robert O'Toole, Paul Prescott, Paul Raffield, Carol Chillington Rutter, Peter Sadler, and Barry Sheils. The project was made possible by a grant from the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme run by the Higher Education Academy.

Methods

The workshop is the fundamental activity in pedagogic interaction between facilitator and participant in OSL. The following section offers examples of a variety of workshop activities that can be adapted easily for use across the disciplines in Higher Education. Each activity is designed so that it does not demand intensive use of resources, and can be facilitated by anyone with teaching responsibilities in the sector.

Theory

OSL It includes methods such as ‘enactive’ learning, ‘kinaesthetic’ learning and the various methods of teaching developed by practitioners such as Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire, and related to the work of thinkers like Vygotsky, Howard Gardner, and David A. Kolb. It also has affinities with ‘applied drama’, ‘applied theatre’, or ‘applied performance’. OSL can include any kind of learning in which the participants are required to engage with their own physicality in a workshop environment.

Further detail is available on the OSL website, and in Open-space Learning: a Transdisciplinary Pedagogy.

External links

University of Warwick Royal Shakespeare Company

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